Pololu Blog

Welcome to the Pololu Blog, where we provide updates about what we and our customers are doing and thinking about. This blog used to be Pololu president Jan Malášek’s Engage Your Brain blog; you can view just those posts here.

In my February post about our new equipment, I wrote about why I did not get a jet printer for solder paste. Well, I ended up getting one after all, and it arrived today.

We have a great building, but we don’t have loading docks, which always makes these big equipment deliveries a bit more of an adventure. Despite assurances that the crate would be at the back of the truck (and that it would have a lift gate that could handle the weight), it arrived way at the front.

At least it wasn’t as big of a crate in as deep of a truck as this time. The Mycronic MY600 jet printer is not the biggest machine, but it weighs a ton because of its granite base. And by “it weighs a ton”, I mean literally more than two tons. Especially with the weight of the crate and the other accessories in there, it was way too much for the lift gate. We tried to get two pallet trucks under it but could not get it to move, even after repositioning the truck to make the crate moving downhill.

Because of the crate’s weight and weight distribution, we couldn’t drag it downhill even with two pallet trucks.

The big forklift we rented had not arrived yet, but our smaller forklift was able to add enough pulling power to get the crate to the back of the truck.

Dragging the MY600 jet printer crate out of the truck with our smaller forklift.

MY600 jet printer crate almost to the back of the truck.

I like noticing that silver Honda in the back of some of these pictures. Here it is almost sixteen years ago (more about our first ten years in Vegas here):

Leaving Watertown, MA on 30 May 2002.

The big forklift arrived just in time to keep us from attempting some small forklift plus lift gate kind of stunt.

10,000 pound forklift with long forks arrived just in time.

The crate had a very lopsided weight distribution, and the crate had some peculiar skids that required some precision alignment to get the fork into the pocket. (The small gap was too small for the pallet trucks, which contributed to the earlier difficulty in moving the crate with pallet trucks.)

Couldn’t they have given us a few more inches for the fork to fit?

Ryan lining up the forks just right to get under the MY600 jet printer crate.

I really liked truck driver Sharrieff, with a great “we’re going to work together and we’re going to get this crate down” attitude. I just noticed now as I wrote this up that he’s the owner of his trucking company.

Woo, the crate is safely on the ground!

With the crate in our warehouse and the sides removed, it was easier to see why the weight distribution was so off-center.

First glimpse of the MY600 jet printer in its crate.

MY600 jet printer unwrapped.

And here it is in its temporary home next to the Europlacer stencil printer we got earlier this year:

Mycronic MY600 jet printer temporarily in position next to Europlacer stencil printer.

It’s a temporary home since we will be doing some major remodeling of our building later this year. At the moment we have two full SMT assembly lines, with the newest pick-and-place machine separately on its own in a batch setup. Once we free up more space on the main manufacturing floor, we should be putting the jet printer in line with the pick and place machine in a third complete line that should be ultra-optimized for efficient manufacturing in small quantities. Installation of the new jet printer isn’t until after Memorial Day, and I will be sure to post more updates once we have the machine in action.

This is the second new motor driver product in less than a week, and I’m really excited about this one: the TB9051FTG from Toshiba. The TB67H420FTG I posted about the other day has this new part beat for higher voltages, but its one shortcoming for our purposes is that it doesn’t work at lower voltages. This new TB9051 doesn’t go up into those voltages where it starts getting dangerous, but it covers a great operating range of 4.5 V to 28 V, with transient operation to 40 V, which means you can use this driver with everything from 6 V lead-acid batteries and 2-cell LiPo packs all the way up to 24 V systems and 6-cell LiPo packs, maybe even 7-cell packs. The operating voltage range is similar to another recent favorite of mine, Maxim’s MAX14870, but this new Toshiba part delivers almost double the current.

With its excellent operating voltage range and great current ability for an integrated package, I expect the TB9051 to be an ideal all-around DC brushed motor driver for most indoor robots and other projects that do not involve moving frighteningly large objects at potentially catastrophic speeds. The chip seems positioned to compete performance-wise with my previous almost-favorite chip, the MotorolaFreescale NXP MC33926. That chip would have been my favorite if it had been easier to work with Freescale, and things have only gotten worse since NXP acquired them and then got distracted by yet another merger, this time with Qualcomm, which seems to have been in limbo forever. Maybe their sales are actually doing great, and we just have a hard time with them because they are busy with bigger customers. In any case, a part with great performance is not so great overall if it’s difficult to get it, so you can expect us to be updating some of those products that use the NXP part to use the Toshiba part instead.

One pretty obvious feature the TB9051 has over the MC33926 is its smaller size, from 8 mm x 8 mm down to 6 mm x 6 mm, which is great for getting these onto smaller boards in smaller spaces, but it might also have some ramifications for how it tolerates pushing the limits of the specs. We liked how the MC33926 was able to endure lots of abuse from customers who were pushing it because it was our highest-voltage integrated driver. The TB9051 is, like the MC33926, an automotive-rated part, so it is intended to last a long time in harsh conditions. It’s interesting to see how thick the packages for these chips are, and I like their thickness (similar to how I like the proportions on 737 airplanes):

This video makes it seem like Toshiba is quite proud of their packaging accomplishment with the TB9051FTG:

Is the “competitor” in this video the MC33926? Sure seems like it to me. I know of no other part like that, and I keep looking.

Toshiba has not publicly posted a complete datasheet for the TB9051FTG yet, so the product page for our carrier only has a preliminary summary document. Our product page has more information about how to use the device, and we are working on getting a complete datasheet that we can post.

Since I expect this driver to hit a nice sweet spot for many of our customers’ general-purpose motor control needs, it’s a good candidate for using in some higher channel count products. We have not gone much beyond two motors (the TReX motor controllers have a third, unidirectional channel), and I would like to know what kind of interest there is in single boards that can control three or more motors. If you would like to see such products, please let me know.

As with all of our new product announcements, we are offering an introductory discount to make it extra easy to try out these new drivers. Be among the first 100 customers to use coupon code TB9051INTRO (click to add the coupon code to your cart) and get up to three units for just $4.95 each. We are still manufacturing our initial stock of these, and even if the quantity shown online goes to zero, you can backorder with the coupon price and chances are that we will be able to fill your order the same day.

Arduino Day is this Saturday, May 12, and in celebration, we are having a big sale on many of our Arduino-related products, including Pololu-made Arduino shields and Arduino-compatible A-Stars and robots. For those who aren’t necessarily enamored with the Arduino environment but are excited about AVR microcontrollers, you can program these products from AVR Studio or other environments using our AVR Programmer, which is also on sale. And because of the awesome way we don’t include motors with the Balboa or Zumo Robot kits, we are also putting those on sale so you can get all the parts for your robots at a discount (we’ll let it slide if you just want to stock up on motors independent of any kind of Arduino application)!

I think of our new A-Star 32U4 Mini SV as more of an update than a genuinely new product. For those of you not already familiar with our A-Star 32U4 Minis, they are a series of ATmega32U4-based, USB-programmable controllers with integrated switching regulators that offer operating voltage ranges not available on typical Arduino-compatible products; the “SV” variant features a step-down converter that enables efficient operation with inputs as high as 40 V. The slight PCB update for this latest product was done primarily for manufacturing reasons (e.g. reset button footprint change, addition of a test point, and switching to an ENIG finish that has worked better for us for double-sided assembly), but I figured that while we were updating all our internal records for the new PCB, we might as well also upgrade the regulator.

There’s a difficulty to making small improvements to products when we have hundreds of distributors around the world since even if we clear out our inventory of older versions before shipping newer units, we cannot control the inventory at distributors’ warehouses. We’re all usually tolerant of products being a little better than advertised, but when we try out a product, and then buy another one, and it ends up being worse than the one we already had, it just doesn’t feel right. (That’s one reason we sometimes do not reveal exact components we use, to avoid over-specifying some aspect of a product that we feel is not that important and that we do not want to commit to.) Once the regulator was different (and better!) enough to merit changing the product specifications, we needed to change the product number, and hence we have a new product.

The regulator change is from the ISL85415 to the ISL85418, both made by Renesas (which acquired Intersil). The ISL85415 was the first of a great regulator family by Intersil, and they expanded the family with several pin-compatible versions with various current specifications. These new parts could also operate to 40 V instead of the 36 V of the original ISL85415, but even as various aspects of the datasheets got updated, the maximum voltage rating on the ISL85415 in particular did not.

Renesas website screen capture showing ISL85415 is only part in its family with 36 V maximum input.

I asked our Intersil contact about why only the ISL85415 wasn’t rated to 40 V. It sounded like it was getting made on the same process as the other parts, and that the higher voltage rating of the later parts in the family was more the result of better characterization (and thus confidence) in the process than in any modifications to the process. In other words, new ISL85415 parts can probably do 40 V just like the other parts, and the older ISL85415 parts probably the same; they just weren’t confident about calling them 40 V parts then. But who knows what the inside story is. Maybe they did tweak their recipes a bit, and once they had parts out in the world with the 36 V spec, they didn’t want to change it without changing the part number, just like we couldn’t just keep our old A-Star part number and also talk about the higher maximum input voltage.

A-Star 32U4 Mini ULV, LV, and SV.

In case you’re wondering why we didn’t just put the even better ISL85410 or ISL854102 with 1.0 A and 1.2 A outputs on the new board, it’s because the performance limit moved more to the inductor, and even if the better regulator chip takes up the same space, we would need a bigger inductor to take advantage of that. And the A-Star Minis are pretty packed designs, so there’s not much room for a bigger inductor.

So, to make a long story short, the main new feature of the updated A-Star 32U4 Mini SV is that it can now take up to 40 V input and give you up to 800 mA to work with. This chart shows you what the new regulator (in darker green) can do compared to the older one (lighter green) on the A-Star Mini. It looks like the old one already provided well over its 500 mA specification.

Typical maximum output current of the regulators on the A-Star 32U4 Mini boards.

To make this new product a little more exciting, we reassessed our costs and cut some of our margins in keeping with our push this year to be more competitive in our manufacturing. We have reduced the unit price from $19.95 to $14.95. And as usual for our new product releases this year, we’re offering an extra introductory discount: use coupon code ASMINISVINTRO to get up to three units for just $9.95. (Click to add the coupon code to your cart.) Our promotion banner shows the usual limit for the first 100 coupon uses, but since we’re also having our Arduino Day sale, we’re removing that restriction for the duration of the sale. If we run out of stock during the sale, you can still backorder with the discount, and we should be able to catch up with production within a few days.

Related products

Hey! We have a new dual motor driver carrier for Toshiba’s exciting TB67H420FTG that offers quite the power jump from the TB6612FNG we popularized over a decade ago. This chip has a recommended operating range of 10-47 V and can deliver peaks of 4.5 A per channel. In our tests on this carrier, without additional heat sinking or airflow, the maximum continuous current is about 1.7 A per channel.

One of the most common questions we get about our motor drivers is whether the outputs can be paralleled to drive a single bigger motor. The TB67H420FTG specifically has that feature built-in so that you can safely do that while only requiring control signal connections for one channel. This brings the available current for single-motor operation to 9 A peak and about 3.4 A continuous.

The TB67H420FTG has a maximum supply voltage of 50 V, making it one of the highest-voltage drivers we have available. Please note that we populated with 50 V capacitors on the supply line, so there is less margin there than on our usual products if you want to push the upper voltage limits of this chip. As with most of our carriers, we also added reverse voltage protection. The MOSFET we use for that is a 40 V max MOSFET, so the maximum reverse voltage that it protects you from is that same 40 V. If you’re wondering why we didn’t use higher-voltage parts, it’s because the next standard voltages are much higher, 100 V in the case of the capacitors. Getting the same capacitance at that rating would require bulkier, more expensive capacitors for almost no benefit. I’m telling you here in case you are one of those people who like to put 55 V on a 50 V max part just to see what will happen.

Be among the first 100 customers to use coupon code TB67H420INTRO (click to add the coupon code to your cart) and get up to three units at the introductory special price of $5.95 each. The first batches are just coming out of production, so even if the available stock goes to zero, you can still backorder with the coupon price and chances are that we will be able to fill your order the same day.

Related products

On Monday, after receiving a photo of some wonky-looking terminal blocks, our tech support team mentioned to me that we get a good amount of photos from customers needing help with their products that have their terminal blocks installed incorrectly. They either aren’t stacked together properly, are inserted into the wrong holes on the boards, or they’re soldered incorrectly. I tried to make some recreations of the problems we see most often so you can see what I’m talking about:

So at the request of our support team, I made this video that goes over how terminal blocks should be installed:

The carrier board for the VL53L1X that many of us have been waiting for is finally here! The VL53L1X is ST’s newest time-of-flight (ToF) range finder for which we first saw announcements over a year ago, but they were not available to us for ordering until earlier this year. The part is pin-compatible with the earlier VL53L0X, so we were able to put them on the same PCB as we use for that carrier as soon as our first reel of new sensors came in.

Be among the first 100 customers to use coupon code VL53L1XINTRO (click to add the coupon code to your cart) and get up to five units at the introductory special price of $8.88 each. We have a few hundred made to begin with, and we are continuing to make more, so even if the available stock goes to zero, you can still backorder with the coupon price and chances are that we will be able to fill your order the same day.

In our last blog post, we announced the release of our second generation of Jrk Motor Controllers with Feedback. If that announcement wasn’t enough to get you excited about the Jrks, here’s a short video to give you a taste of what the Jrks can do:

You totally want one now, right? Well lucky for you, our special introductory coupon is still valid. The first 100 customers to use coupon code JRKG2INTRO can get 40% off up to three units. (Click to add the coupon code to your cart.)

After many months or years of work (depending on how you look at it), I am happy to introduce our newest motor controllers, the Jrk G2 USB Motor Controllers with Feedback, which we are releasing today in four power variants:

The main purpose of the Jrk G2 family is to enable feedback-based control of DC brushed motors, simplifying closed-loop control of things like the position of an actuator. An example that is probably familiar to most of us is the common hobby servo that has an output shaft that can rotate to various positions as commanded over a simple interface. The Jrk motor controllers can be used for giant versions of those servos, and they can also be used in many other systems as long as you can somehow get feedback in the form of an analog voltage or a frequency. Analog voltage feedback is often easy to get from potentiometers that can serve as angle or position sensors.

The frequency feedback feature is handy for maintaining a speed of a motor independent of your supply voltage and motor load. You might use that kind of feature to run a treadmill at some set speed independent of the weight of the lab rats on it or to stir some jar of goop at a constant rate as the goop gradually thickens. With mobile robot applications, it can be handy to have a motor controller that will make your wheel go at the speed you set independent of whether the robot is on a hard floor or a carpet. (The Jrks do not support quadrature encoders, but you can use one channel of a quadrature encoder as the tachometer for the Jrk. In some applications, keeping track of absolute position is not necessary, or the quadrature encoder can be monitored directly by a main controller that could still benefit from the closed-loop speed control being taken care of by the motor controller.)

To control a wide range of motors in a variety of applications, it’s important to be able to configure a lot of parameters, which makes the Jrk’s USB connection and free configuration utility software extremely important. Even if you ultimately want to use your Jrk in a radio control installation or command it over I²C from your favorite embedded controller, it’s very convenient to be able to set everything up from your computer.

That screenshot is actually of the utility for the original Jrks, which we released almost 9 years ago (I announced those on the forum because we did not have this blog back then). You might notice on some older web pages that we referred to the original Jrks as our second-generation feedback controllers. The really original ancestor to today’s new motor controllers is this product we called simply Pololu 3A Motor Controller with Feedback, which we released at the beginning of 2005. Here are a picture and block diagram of that controller:

Pololu 3A Motor Controller with Feedback.

SMC03A motor controller typical application block diagram.

Candice and I were probably still running Pololu out of our house back when we started work on that controller, and it’s probably the last product of ours for which Candice wrote some of the firmware. That controller led to the development of a larger, customized controller (similar to our SMC04 High-Power Motor Controller with Feedback) and an even higher-power version that was used on control cables of large autonomous parachutes for the military.

Back to the new Jrk G2 family: these new controllers are in many ways a refinement of the original Jrks, which have been used all over the world in applications from animatronic displays to motion simulators and even full-sized airplanes. The most noticeable improvement on the four Jrk G2 controllers we are releasing today is the increased power available from their discrete MOSFET H-bridges. The G2 high-power motor driver design is part of the reason for the “G2” in the new Jrk family name, though we plan on releasing lower-power, smaller Jrk G2 products later this year. The new driver technology, along with going to double-sided PCB assembly and four-layer PCBs, allowed us to make much higher-power controllers that are smaller than the old Jrk 12v12, which used to be our highest-power version.

The Jrk G2 24v13 and 24v21 in particular open up new application opportunities because they can operate off of 24 V power rails, making them appropriate for huge linear actuators (note that we only carry 12 V versions right now, partly because we did not have controllers that we could recommend for 24 V use). It’s exciting that these tiny boards can control such huge actuators, and the size difference is so big it’s difficult to convey in a picture:

The size difference makes it difficult to get a Jrk G2 24v13 and an industrial-duty linear actuator in the same picture.

Other features new to the G2 Jrks are an I²C interface option and an improved tachometer/frequency feedback mode that now offers pulse width measuring rather than only frequency counting to allow for better control of low-speed motors with lower-resolution encoders or tachometers. Here is a summary of the main features of the Jrk G2 motor controllers:

As with all of our new product releases this year, we are offering an extra introductory discount: the first 100 customers to use coupon code JRKG2INTRO can get 40% off up to three units. (Click to add the coupon code to your cart.)

After spending many months conducting thousands of motor tests, we are excited to finally publish performance graphs for our micro metal gearmotors (2MB pdf). In some sense, this datasheet is the culmination of a decade of work to improve our processes and better characterize our gearmotors, and we have come a long way since those early tests clamping motors in vises and making them lift ever heavier bags of steel bearings. Here is one of the setups we are using now:

Micro metal gearmotor undergoing dynamic performance testing.

The key thing is to be able to apply a measurable, variable load while the motor is spinning, which we do via an electromagnetic brake coupled to a torque meter. A combination of programs running on an A-Star 32U4 Prime test controller and a PC automatically sweep the load through a sequence of points while measuring parameters such as speed, current, and torque (plus internal test rig currents, voltages, etc).

Micro Metal Gearmotor performance test setup.

These performance characterizations are the latest example of our continued commitment to being the best source for this popular form factor of gearmotor. You might see similar-looking motors elsewhere, but no one comes close to our offering, from the quality of the gears to our exclusive long-life carbon brush options to the overall breadth of our selection (over 100 versions!), all in stock for shipment the day you order.

Please note that we are still in the process of updating the specifications on our website to match new, more accurate data from the performance graphs, so if you notice discrepancies between what is in the datasheet and what is on the product page, go with the datasheet.

If you have any questions or feedback about these graphs or if there is additional information you would like to see available for our motors, please feel free to contact us (or just leave a comment below). And if you are wondering about graphs for our larger gearmotors, don’t worry, those are coming! (If you need something before those datasheets are done, just let us know and we might be able to get you preliminary data for a particular gearmotor.)